The 4 Areas of Comprehensive Notification Coverage

Reaching everyone, everywhere can be easier said than done. Organizations often have many moving parts making it hard to ensure that life-saving communication reaches everyone, especially in an emergency.

The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) is a U.S.-based organization established in 1896 and has since written hundreds of codes and standards to ensure facility safety. The NFPA 72: National Fire Alarm and Signaling Code Handbook outlines the safety provisions necessary for fire detection, signaling, and emergency communications. Chapter 24 of the Handbook provides guidelines for emergency communication systems and stipulates four types of Emergency Communication System Layers.

Here at Alertus, we look at NFPA’s types of emergency communication as areas of coverage that organizations need to have in order to reach their constituents regardless of where they are.

These areas include indoor, outdoor, personal, and public notification. (click here to download infographic)

Indoor Notification

Indoor notification consists of common elements such as public address systems, fire evacuation systems, and digital signage. These elements are typically permanent fixtures or assets within a building that can be leveraged for audible or visual communication. In an emergency, it is crucial that you have a form of building-wide communication to provide everyone in your facility with life-saving information.

The Alert Beacon is featured in the NFPA 72 handbook as a recommended means of indoor notification. Read more about the Alert Beacon here.

Outdoor Notification

Whether you have to reach a football field, parking lot, or a group of coworkers taking lunch outside, outdoor notification is a major part of a comprehensive notification solution. High Power Speaker Arrays (HPSA) are a great way to reach people outdoors with audible notification. HPSAs can provide siren tones, or text-to-speech technology to clearly enunciate detailed information to large areas.

Personal Notification

While indoor notification reaches major parts of the building and outdoor notification reaches those outside, personal notification is the perfect way to ensure your message reaches every individual in your facility, remote, or in transit. Personal notification includes a wide variety of alerting assets, from emails and desktop notifications to VoIP phones and mobile apps. Personal notification ensures that recipients are never far from emergency notification, even on the go.

Public Alerting

For messages that need to go beyond the facility, public alerting is that additional push for full notification coverage. Public alerting includes elements such as radio/tv broadcasting and posting on social networks. It allows organizations to cast the widest possible net and reach the public if and when the situation deems it necessary.

NFPA recommends that your emergency notification system includes two forms of communication, at least one indoor solution and a secondary method from one of the other areas. However, Alertus recommends and specializes in providing a comprehensive solution that reaches everyone, everywhere, in every area of notification. Click here to learn more about unified facility mass notification and how you can enhance your emergency communication efforts.

Want to see how all of these areas of notification can be activated in an emergency? Schedule a hassle-free demo today.